A fan's guide to Motorsport

SPO: BMW Mwhat?!? GTE >.<

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for me, coupled with a relatively slow time period in the world of motorsports, and I don’t post for a week and a half.

That being said, there still isn’t much to talk about. The Blancpain GT race on the weekend was pretty good. Lamborghini is looking fairly strong to start the year, I hope they can take the title this year but we will see how that goes.

Before I get into the meat and potatoes of this post, I want to say that although this blog is mostly me saying whatever I want, I tend to get fairly reactive when it comes to newsy type posts. I’m an engineer by trade, not a journalist; so this blog is more or less for fun. So every now and then I will write mainly 100% opinionated blog posts, which I’m going to call Steve’s Personal Opinion (SPO), which will be put in the title of the post.

So with that, here’s my first official SPO:

Back when I talked about the new Audi R8 GT4 car being unveiled in NYC, I was thinking about what the BMW GTE car will be next year when they return to Le Mans. I knew that it wasn’t going to be the M6, but something different. According to Sportscar 365, that model will be the soon-to-be-announced M8. Yes, the 8 series is apparently coming back. So I can understand that the car will be fairly important and they’d want to show it off to the world by racing it; fair enough.

However, we already talk about how much of a land yacht the M6 race cars are already, add a BIGGER car and I just don’t see how it’s going to work out. The M6 hasn’t been anywhere near as competitive as the Z4 before it, so to go with an even HEAVIER car just has me baffled.

What ever happened to the M4 (or M3 Coupe, pick one in your head and continue on)? It’s the most iconic car they make, and hasn’t been raced in an FIA sanctioned class since the M3 GT2 car back in the early 2010’s. BMW has the M235iR, M6 GT3 and GTE cars currently in their racing stables. Now, while they DO have an M4 race car, it’s their DTM car which doesn’t race anywhere but Europe and it’s only one series. So where is the M4 love? The current generation car is a gorgeous piece of machinery, and also sounds pretty amazing. The only reason I could think is that the M4 has an I6 engine, far smaller than the V8’s that are in the M6 and (I assume, anyway) the M8. This hasn’t stopped the lads at BMW before though. The Z4 GT3 and GTE cars had V8’s which the road car never had. Maybe BMW feels it’s too much of a deviation from the production car now, especially that the M4 has gone back to the I6.

I’m not saying that all of BMW’s race cars should be the M4, but this is what mostly everybody thinks when you say BMW race car. Let’s stop with the nonsensical tomfoolery BMW and just make a damn competitive GT car. I don’t car if you need to resurrect the M1 from the dead and kick ass, let’s go!

The last thing I’ll say is that BMW doesn’t want to go back to LMP1 racing because the class is not futuristic enough for them to think it’s worthwhile for road car development. So your answer is to have your biggest car in your lineup go racing? Sure, that makes TOTAL sense there….It’s not like you are Bentley and the M8 is practically the only car you make.

Of course, the new M8 GTE could come in next year at Silverstone and just spank the competition silly. If that happens I’ll eat my words. I hope I’ll be eating my words come this time next year. But until then, tisk tisk BMW.

SMB

IMSA, WEC, PWC, Blancpain, F1, SuperGT and many in between. I also race in Canadian Chumpcar with Kings of Neon. I try to use as many of my own photos as well, but occasionally I'll use published photos.